Yes, I agree. I hate the Masonic. EC as awesome, as was LP, but sound dude was a total loser. The show could have been much better with a real sound guy. Sorry, I will shut up now. Just not digging the current sound guy... IM OUT!!

the printed set list is not accurate: no cheap reward, watch your step, my all time doll, she's pulling out the pin, stella hurt, slow drag, when i was curel, scare myself, i want you, i can't stand up, veronica, man out of time or all the rage. the show went past 11 as it was; there was no way to fit these all in on a school night.

Dr Luther - I did not miss your point. Sound is horrible in that venue. Hire a sound dude who is asleep at the board and it''a even worse. I was so worked up about the lousy sound I couldn't enjoy the show. I think I could have done a better job at the board and I'm a total idiot. I've seen better EC shows. Too bad I didn't hit the Santa Rosa show. Whatever. He probably won't be back to the Bay Area for another year now. Lame.

It's really interesting to hear your commnets about the sound. I spoke to the sound guy at last year's Detour shows on a few occasions as I bummed a setlist off him. He was an American and has replaced Welsh Dave who rolled his eyes everytime he saw me coming (!). I thought the new chap was really great, the sound in Harrogate was perfect and even in Southampton where the Guildhall wasn't built for any sort of musical performances, the balance was really good and a lot of the potential boomingness that could have occurred was obviated. The sound guy said he was pleased to have got the balance right there because of the awkwardness of the acoustics. Seems a shame if the standard of sound has been compromised - like Mojo, I hate it when the building interferes with the sound and we're lucky to have some acoustically magnificent buildings in the Uk like The Sage at gateshead, Symphony Hall at Birmingham and the wonderful picket In Liverpool ! (TB)

And even then, it didn't really get compromised until the three of them where onstage.That's really when it went downhill.Trying to mix mandolin, guitar, slide, Elvis screaming, and 3-part harmonies in that barn is probably impossible.

The night before sounded tremendous. The guy can only do so much under shitty circumstances.

Ok. I'm wrong about the sound guy. I know nothing. He is employed, so he has to be decent, right? Was in a bit of a mood yesterday. Wish I could see one more show on this tour to test my ears and the sound guy again. Bummer.

Well, I guess I missed a great show then. I was definitely crabby so maybe that didn't help, plus I was late (missed Larkin Poe ) due to shuttling a friend across town. Whatever.

From David Talbot's (author/SF activist / cool dude) FB post:

Elvis was in the building last night, at the Masonic in San Francisco -- and man did he rock it. The master in top form, perhaps the best show of his career -- and I've seen just about every tour, dating back to his first swing through the colonies back in the '70s (paired with Mink de Ville and Graham Parker -- what a bill). He clearly has some long fond history here in SF, but he's also aware of what the city (and the world) are going through these days. Among the few non-original songs he sang: "Side by Side" (Oh we ain't got a barrel of money/maybe we're ragged and funny...) and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime."

With the loss of so many giant entertainment figures over the past few months, many of them at a relatively young age, you can’t blame baby boomers for feeling the chill of mortality these days. That mood was matched by Elvis Costello’s solo “Detour” show at San Francisco’s Masonic auditorium on March 30. In the stories he shared about his late father Ross MacManus, in the songs offered up to absent collaborators and friends Allen Toussaint and Dan Hicks, and in the slower, contemplative readings he gave “Complicated Shadows” and “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes,” there were many ghosts onstage Wednesday night with Elvis.

Conceptually and musically, the show felt like a continuation of Elvis’s lyrical, stock-taking memoir, Unfaithful Music and Invisible Ink, and the reading/interview/slideshow/concert he gave at the Nourse Theater here last October to promote the book. The middle of the Masonic stage was dominated by a huge box fashioned into a retro TV set. Pre-show, Costello’s music videos played on the TV screen, a canny way to give fans some of the songs that Costello wasn’t intending to play during the show. During the show, the TV showed slides from Elvis’s family scrapbook and a sweet video of his father (looking so much like young awkward Elvis) and his band attempting a Latin flavor on the folk song “If I Had A Hammer.”

As Costello explained early in the show (and writes about so beautifully in the book), Ross MacManus, was a big-band singer who enjoyed a bit of renown in post-war England, playing dance halls, recording cover versions of popular songs of the day to be played on BBC Radio and appearing on television. While other kids would wait for their fathers to come home from the office or factory, explained Elvis at the Masonic, he would “take a screwdriver to the back of the TV looking for Dad”.

Unfaithful Music is as much Ross MacManus’s story as it is that of his son. Costello writes of an only child’s love for a father who wasn’t always there, and the connection they shared though music. In telling these intertwined stories, Elvis, who achieved a level of fame his father never did, pulls his dad up along with him. But Elvis also clearly identifies more and more with the journeyman musician now that he’s in middle age, and now that the radio/record company/MTV machine that brought him to fame over the course of his first handful of albums has long been dismantled. Costello now does exactly as he pleases, and he does it in a variety of genres, with more emphasis on the performing and less on the recording. More than Dylan, but less than Springsteen, Costello gives the people what they want in concert — these days, he always plays “Alison” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” — but in exchange for those songs, he also gives us the music we need, even if we didn’t realize we needed it.

And that’s what happened at the Masonic, as Elvis offered up a long set heavy on welcome deep tracks (“Church Underground,” “Motel Matches,” “Blame It on Cain,” “Pads, Paws and Claws”) and covers (like Los Lobos’ “A Matter of Time”). Some durable crowd favorites were presented in their alternate forms; “Everyday I Write the Book” was wrapped into a lovely cover of Nick Lowe’s “When I Write the Book,” while “Radio, Radio” was present in its embryonic form, “Radio Soul,” which extols the true salvation of pop music rather than sneering at the medium:

“I was tuning in the shine on the light night dial on the front of my radioWhen the man said there’s nothing in the news today except trouble and we all knowOne thing we got too much of it is trouble, guess you know that’s trueWhat we need is a little music, so we’re here to entertain you.”

“What we need is a little music, so we’re here to entertain you.” After the recent string of soul-shaking losses of entertainment giants, those lines ring truer than ever. How many of us soothed the shock of David Bowie’s passing by listening to his music obsessively, to keep him with us? But while we were fans of Bowie, Costello played on bills with him (and Lou Reed), as a slide on the TV showed us. We might have acutely felt the loss of Allen Toussaint and the Bay Area’s cowboy-swing-bluesman, Dan Hicks, but they were Elvis’s friends. And the show felt at times — a gorgeous “Ascension Day” for his The River in Reverse and Spike collaborator Toussaint, a quiet, heart-breaking version of Hicks’ “Not My Time to Go” at the piano, a picture of Hicks filling the TV screen — as if it had been crafted to be a place for performer and audience to mourn together. The setlist, and Elvis’s between song stories, kept returning to two themes: Life as a working musician, and the music and lives of those no longer here.

Not that any of this was gloomy or draggy. Costello was, as always, a witty and genial host, and watching his mischievous “Take that!” expressions after he nailed an unexpected song choice, or finished off the blistering, looped guitar solo on “Watching the Detectives” was a treat. By the last two of the 11 songs he sang during encores, the Grateful Dead’s “It Must Have Been the Roses” and, of course, “Peace, Love and Understanding” (both augmented by opening act, the sister-duo Larkin Poe), the audience was screaming, literally screaming, like this was a Beatles concert.

The highlights for me were his cover of the 1930’s standard “Walking My Baby Back Home” (which he dedicated to his wife and kids), his own plaintive “Jimmie Standing in the Rain” (with a coda of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,?” sung a cappella and unmiked) and, at the piano, a downbeat version of the usually peppy 1927 chestnut “Side by Side.”

“Side by Side” was the key to everything that made this show tick. “Oh, we don’t know what’s coming tomorrow/ Maybe it’s trouble and sorrow/But we’ll travel the road sharing our load/ Side by side.” Here was the perfect expression of how the bond between friends, between family members, between musician and audience, makes life worth living.

But also, “Side by Side,” “Walking My Baby Back Home” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” are part of a bygone tradition and style of music-hall popular song, one that Costello draws upon in his empathetic portrait of showbiz has-beens and never-weres “Jimmie Standing in the Rain.” This music belonged to the world his grandfather Pat, also a musician, and his father inhabited. It seems as if Costello has taken on the responsibility of keeping a light shining on this dusty corner of pop tradition. He keeps singing the songs of the dead, keeping it all alive.

It’s common for the fame of the song to equal the fame of the artist, and Elvis Costello came out with a handful of hits in the 80s that have made their way into the American consciousness. “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” is one of the great rock anthems of the early 80s: a wanting to be more caring, but feeling burned and raw from life’s disappointments, and is as least as famous as the artist himself. He’s always been a broad reaching artist; early tracks of his like “Shipbuilding” and “Almost Blue” straddle the edge of jazz, but he’s best known for his angsty, sometimes political rock and roll from the 80s and early 90s.

He’s evolved as an artist since then, releasing jazz and country albums containing some truly excellent material, and more or less leaving his rock days behind. I imagine it must be a frustrating blessing to be so beloved as an artist for such a small subsection of a vast and eclectic catalogue; shows sell out but the audience wants the same five or six songs, when there are fifty newer songs that will never receive the same attention. It’s like the inverse to “adultolescence”, where instead of the artist’s refusal to grow, everyone else is attached to what he did at age 25. I’m guilty of this, and while I can get behind his new material, and his move towards a Merle Haggard musical style – a grandiose goal, and one he can pull off – I miss the angry rock star who I grew up listening to.

The stage was set up with one of those big porch style chairs, painted blue, as well as a baby grand piano and about a dozen guitars. Additionally, there was a gigantic prop television behind Costello, made to look like one of the old CRT sets from the sixties, and it showed his old music videos as well as old photographs of him and his family. There was an incredible video showed before the encore: Costello’s father, from the sixties or so, singing “If I Had a Hammer” with a band of drummers, all clad in tuxes. It had its own impressive kitsch value and was part of a running theme throughout the show, wherein Costello talked extensively about his musical family. When he sat down at the piano, he said “I have to take care of this piano, I borrowed it from my wife” — and the crowd cheered in acknowledgement of the gift from his wife, jazz musician Diana Krall. Was this a goodbye tour? Was it a retrospective? Isn’t every tour a retrospective when you’ve been releasing music for this long? I think this is a curse of having made music for so long – how do you keep reinventing your show?

For me, the Gen X-er raised on a musical diet heavy on hard rock, the show was a little bit of a curve ball, and I half hoped (in vain) that the giant television would be removed to reveal a hidden drumset, but Costello delivered an acoustic set, and for most of the show he was alone on the stage with his instruments. This was particularly powerful, because he resonates as an introvert, someone not naturally comfortable with crowds, and this lack of ease is part of his charm; no matter how practiced he is, he’s always comes across a little raw and vulnerable.

He changed his instrument after every song, changing guitars or going over to the piano, changing styles and genres, but a lot of his performance had a jazzy tinge to it. Even when he was veering into country, as with “Walking My Baby Back Home”, he used a lot of open jazz chords in his arrangement. Some of his arrangements were a little more traditional; he opened playing a jangly guitar accompanying “Complicated Shadows” and then “Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes.” He prefaced a lot of the songs with stories; before playing “Watching the Detectives”, he talked about how he was influenced by Film Noir, staying up late and yearning for the actress, and thinking all women looked like her. He told stories about his grandparents and his kids, and his father’s career as an entertainer. For a few of his country songs, a mandolin and a slide guitar player came out to accompany him, and it was, actually, beautiful.

However, at these concerts where aging rockers perform, I notice that old rock-and-roll seems to have been stripped of its indignation politics. In addition to Elvis Costello, I’ve seen Prince, Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Elton John in the past year, and not one of them made a political comment. Elton John, not commenting on gay marriage? Springsteen, not commenting on the disappearance of the middle class? Rock and roll seems anemic lately, and from the man who penned “Oliver’s Army” and “Shipbuilding”, I expected some nod to the American clusterfuck, some bit of boiling blood and indignation; it’s possible he’s outgrown this, and I can embrace his new identity, with some resentment for his complacency. He may not be a rock and roller these days, and he can take you on a beautiful musical journey, but you’re definitely getting a more mellow, older, Elvis than you might have some years ago. His musical genius has shifted its focus – it’s still there, but mellower, and beautiful, rather than irate and driving.